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Wow. What a ride. I finished up Ship of Destiny–the culminating volume of Robin Hobb’s mammoth Liveship Traders trilogy–a few days ago. I can understand why Hobb is such a popular writer. In this trilogy, she deftly and masterfully handles a sprawling plot,  an immersive world, multiple points-of-view, and several character arcs. Ship of Destiny is a BIG book (800 pages!), but it is all muscle and bone; no flab. At no point did I feel that the book was padded.

Chaos has come to Bingtown in the wake of Chalcedean attacks, the disappearance of the Satrap and the earthquake in the Rain Wilds. The long-dormant dragon Tintaglia has awakened and is in search of others of her kind. Althea Vestrit sails on the mad Paragon in search of her family’s liveship, Vivacia, now in the hands of the charming and ruthless pirate Captain Kennit. Meanwhile, Althea’s nephew Wintrow, under the auspices of Kennit, learns what it is to be a man. Malta Vestrit, in enemy hands, puts her Trader cunning to good use while her fiance searches desperately for her. There is a sense of great change throughout the book, of things broken and made anew–dragons are in the world again!–and a knowing that nothing will be the same again. The story rushes the majority of the characters into the Pirate Isles, where sailors and Satrap, liveships and dragon and serpents, pirates and soldiers, all meet in one long multi-stage encounter. Yep, it can get pretty intense!

But what makes this trilogy so fascinating to me is how Hobb, in spite of the scope, never loses sight of her characters. In spite of the talk of destiny and fate, I never felt like the characters were pawns in service of the Story (except for one glaring incident involving Kennit which still does not ring true to me); rather they and their actions make the story. Hobb takes special care in developing all of her characters, especially the pirate Captain Kennit (who I loathe, in a weird fascinated/repulsed kinda way). I enjoyed watching Malta grow from a spoiled brat into an independent, smart young woman. I found the tortured Paragon to be a deeply sympathetic and interesting character.

If you love epics, this ambitious nautical fantasy certainly delivers. Thanks to my friend M. for introducing me to Hobb’s work! *waves* (See, it only took me a couple years to go through all the Hobb novels you sent :D).

This post was supposed to go up Christmas Eve, but I spent close to an hour struggling with a slow Internet connection and gave up after getting two pictures uploaded.

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas!

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Our December, in pictures:

Glittery Stars

Science Experiments With Snow

Handprint Wreath

Decorating Cookies

Decorating the Tree

Merry Christmas!

I’m happy to be back revising SoR. Revising, I think, is often where the real work of writing novels is. This is the point where I have to put my thinking cap on, where I have to confront plot issues and grapple with characters. I can’t blow off story problems with a note to come back and fix it later.

Because late is now.

Right Brain has rallied splendidly around the war-banner. Right Brain was not thrilled about being pulled away from the Shiny New Idea of the Week to go do hard stuff. But it had to come around and give me some cool things to work with–some aha! things are coming together moments–or risk being bored to tears.

Left Brain is happy because the backlog is being cleared off the mental Inbox. It’s happy because there is measurable progress. Lo:

SoR Part I Revision: 82 out of 132 pages–DONE.

I know at least a couple of people reading this are also revising novels. How’s it going?

Ok, David again with an update. As you can see from the nifty picture on the left over there, I actually made it across the finish line, clocking in at 50,307 words on Saturday, November 28th. Yep, two days early. And Rabia wants me to write up another post with my thoughts, now that I’ve actually finished (the month, not the novel; that’s still only about half done). So here we go.

Probably the most important thing I realized through this month, without which I don’t think I would have been able to make it: Don’t sweat the stuff. Normally, you hear people saying not to sweat the small stuff, or whatever, but really, it goes deeper than that. When you’re trying to do something like write a first draft of a novel (regardless of how much time you’re giving yourself), don’t worry about any of the details, whether they’re small or freakin’ huge. On the last night, I found that I need to go back and change what happens in the beginning of the novel to start all the action, but that’s ok. I put a note in to get to it during re-write, and went on. Is it a significant change? Well, yeah, it will be. But should it stop me from keeping the story moving forward? Heck no.

On a similar note, always remember that everything’s negotiable. Just because you’ve written it doesn’t make it canon (until you’re published, at least, and perhaps not even then; I’ve seen several books where glaring errors were fixed in a second or third printing).This is an important point for me, because I tend to focus on the details, and could spend an entire evening trying to get a few perfect. Especially names. Names are not easy for me, and I’d love to take tons of time to come up with great names. But whenever I found myself falling into that trap, I reminded myself of one amazing fact: Frodo Baggins was originally written as Bingo. Seriously.

Another point: make a reference that you can access and update quickly and easily. For some, that’s scribbling things down in a notebook, but I find that gets disorganized very quickly (or else I spend too much time trying to decide how much space to leave for lists of characters; see above). For my NaNo novel, I created an excel spreadsheet to track characters, places, and horses (yes, they’re that important); I later added another sheet when I decided I needed it. A word document would also work. It doesn’t need to be fancy; here’s a sample of what I’ve got:

First Name	Last Name	Residence	Role	Alt. Name	Notes
Arnor	Jardin	Stonehaven	Assistant horse farmer	Arnor Gerin/Jalell Thorsa	MC. Please don’t forget him. Born 817 AA.
Lirelai		Lesser Forestal			Riell’s second sister, tended Arnor after Tam’s accident.

As you can see, it’s got holes in it, and I’m ok with that. Its role is to help me keep track of what I’ve already talked about, without having to scan through everything I’ve written so far. I found it to be amazingly helpful.

This next point is something that everyone says in relation to NaNo, but it’s true, and holds for a lot of other stuff as well: make yourself write, even when you don’t feel like it. Even if you’re convinced that what you’re going to be putting down on the page is going to suck. It might. But it might also turn out to include some really good ideas. If you let yourself slack off too long, it’s really easy to let it become a habit. I haven’t worked on Storm Rider since Saturday; I’m going to be back at it tomorrow. (Rabia, hold me accountable on that!)

And speaking of Rabia: as I said in my previous post, having a good sounding board is an amazing tool. I’d talk to Rabia about what was happening in my story, and she’d ask questions, some of which I couldn’t answer…but which I was generally able to answer by the next day. And some of her random suggestions (such as having the main character hit someone in the head with a rock) found their way into the story, though not always in the form she’d suggested (in this case, a different person got struck).

Finally, I always thought it was really weird when Rabia would talk about (or quote other writers saying things like) characters doing or saying unexpected things. I mean, it’s your story; surely you’re not writing anything you haven’t come up with. But then I found strange things happening in my story. Conversations that I had planned out would develop very different undertones as I wrote them, revealing (to me!) aspects of the characters’ relationships with each other that I’d never even considered. Or I’d be writing exposition (everything’s fair in a first draft, including pages of exposition!), and strange, new details would work their way in, and I’d have to stop to consider how the new details could impact the rest of the story. Rabia was very amused whenever I stopped to stare at my fingers in amazement at what had just appeared from them. But the weirdest part for me was that whenever this happened–whenever my subconscious slipped extra details onto the page–I liked it. I mean, it was much, much better than anything I had planned. Weird, cool, freaky, and amazing all at the same time.

So, I’ve survived the insane month-long challenge of NaNo, and now have about half of a novel written; I’m giving myself until the end of January to get the rough draft done. What bouts of insanity have you allowed yourself recently?

Admin: Woohoo! I’m so excited about David’s win and pleased to see him finally following in my literary footsteps (hee!). Thanks for sharing about your experience.